I haven't talked about this side of my life much on this blog as it's about woodworking, but food is one of the all important aspects of [my] life. I've got particular convictions about eating, one of which is cooking from scratch. I leave out all the other parts for now...
This is a photo of a mostly empty cream container, and butter. Now you may be more familiar with the piece of butter on the left, it's paler and rectangular. The butter on the right? Well that's something you can't just buy in the store, it's home made butter. It takes very simple tools (or fancy traditional ones if you're a woodworker) and only about 10 minutes.
Basic instructions are theses: Take a pint of heavy cream (mine is organic from a local creamery), let it sit out at room temperature for 6-12 hours, pour into quart sized mason jar, shake (steadily not violently) for three or so minutes, it should clump and start to look like well butter, drain off liquid (you can save this, it's buttermilk, great for omelets, biscuits etc.), wash with cold water, dump into bowl and work with the back of a spoon to remove the extra water/buttermilk, then salt to taste.
The butter in the picture is about a third of the butter made, my guess is $6 of cream got me 3/4c of buttermilk and a half pound of butter. You may notice that the butter is very yellow, this is from carotene in the cows diet, usually butter is yellower in the spring with better food and paler in the fall/winter. I know this cream comes from well fed cows, and is free range... making the best butter I've ever had.
I don't think I'll be buying butter from the store anymore, making it is just too easy and infinitely tastier, plus now I have an excuse to make all kinds of specialty butter making tools. Let the fun begin!
I like it! I heard that you could use regular whole milk to make butter, but maybe not. Is there a difference in the butter if you let the cream sit out for 6 hours as opposed to 12? That's a pretty big range there. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about the whole milk, there might not be enough cream in there to make a lot of butter from it. Dunno.
ReplyDeleteThere should be a difference, the longer is sits out (up into the 12 hour range) the more complex the flavor will be. It also gets a little tangier from what I'm told. The reason I gave the rage of 6 to 12 is, my butter turned out great, and I was too impatient to wait 12 hours I "churned" in 6.